The Way of the Ant

by Keith Gardner

Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!  It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.  -Proverbs 6:6-8

Have you ever considered what an ant thinks; or more appropriately, might think if it could. Could you imagine a conversation between a materialist ant and a theistic ant? It would be quite revealing. I imagine it would go something like this. 

Mat:  “Theo you are a waste of matter, energy and thinking, believing in something greater than yourself. I believe in what I can see and measure. Look around you; we have created this community by the sweet of our brows, the strength of our backs and the might of our intellect. I don’t recall some force lending us a hand, or some great being giving us advice. No, we did it ourselves.”

Theo: “It is not that some force did or did not lend us a hand or give us advice. It is that we are here and we have the intellect at all to accomplish such a feat. What drives us to work day and night to create such a habitat; to work tirelessly to gather food and to protect our young? Matter alone would not create such a drive. Matter would drive us to fight each other, to fend for ourselves. Matter has no goal or purpose, only the desire to survive.”

Mat:  “You are right; matter has no goal or purpose, but the combination of matter, the need to survive and the passing of time has taught us to work together for our survival. I was exploring the vast wastelands recently and I came across an old community. It was obviously old and primitive. They did not use our modern techniques in construction. There was no hill at the opening and the entrance was completely exposed to the elements. They had obviously not learned to work together and that was their downfall. Our survival is dependent on our working together.”

Theo: “See, you missed it entirely. If working together is necessary to ensure our survival and if the ancient ones did not work together, then there would be no us; there would have been no one to survive and we would not be here. Working together has to be built in to our makeup. We were created to work together; created by something outside of ourselves.”

Mat:  “Then how do you explain the ruins I found? Where’s the community and what about the primitive construction?”

Theo: “Maybe it was destroyed by something greater than itself.”

Mat:  “Destroyed by something greater than itself! You’re mad! I have never seen anything greater than what we have made. If there was something else out there we would have found it, we would have measured it and we would understand it.”

About that time a man doing yard work walks over to the ant hill, wipes his foot over the hill flattening it, exposing the hole in the ground and sprays ant killer into the hole.

Why it is that we believe we can understand everything, or by means of our intellect always determine an answer? (Job 38:1 – 41:34)